Journey To Your Potential

What Really Motivates Us?

Be careful what you wish for.   Understand the benefits and consequences.  Motivation determines who we want to become, what we do, and who we ultimately become.   Categories of motivation include:

• Basic Needs: food and water, shelter, safety, health
• Belonging: family, friends, community
• Pleasure: good food, nice housing, attractive clothing, sex, fun
• Personal Growth: improving mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally and socially
• Pride: to be better than – better looking, smarter, more athletic, nicer things
• Power: to impose my will and my thoughts on others
• Helping Others: to help others, to address their needs, to help them to grow, to create a better future for others, to solve problems, to innovate

We all have basic needs.  We  desire to belong.   This is where we need to be careful.  Others can support us in making the right kind of long-term investments in ourselves and in serving others.   Pleasure needs to be put into balance from a long-term perspective.   If  unbridled it will destroy us.  Personal growth is important in perspective.  Pride is an encompassing and powerful force and is selfish.   Seeking power to impose our willing on others is destructive.  Helping others is the most noble of passions.

For simplicity reasons, we can look at all these categories from two vantage points.  One is founded on pride and the other is on charity.

Pride

Pride gets no pleasure out of being equal with others but in being better, in being richer, smarter or better looking.  It is the comparison that makes you proud.  Pride is self-centeredness  and arrogance.  Pride is enmity toward God and man.  Any desire that feeds our pride (e.g., power, fame, wealth) and focuses on unbridled pleasures that hurts ourselves and hurts others – in the end leads to misery and destruction.

Charity

Service and charity is the source of happiness.  It is only when we lose our lives that we can find it.

What Really Motivates Us?